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October 21, 2012

[One Afghan soldier named
Yusuf came down to the checkpoint with a cup of tea for the Americans’
interpreter and then returned to the outpost, according to the Afghan account.
Moments later, an Afghan soldier who had already been at the checkpoint, a
Tajik from Baghlan Province named Din Muhammad, raised his gun and fired,
killing Sgt. First Class Daniel T. Metcalfe, 29, and wounding another American
near him, according to the American account of the violence.]

SISAY OUTPOST,
Afghanistan — There is an Afghan version of this story and a very different
American one, but the moral is the same: insider killings of Western troops and
civilians by Afghan forces, which have taken 51 coalition lives this year, have
broken trust between the two military forces and laid bare the anger and fear
each harbors toward the other.

The details of an
insider shooting that happened Sept. 29 near this small Afghan Army outpost in
eastern Afghanistan underscore the escalating distrust that surrounds
interactions between American and Afghan troops. The attack devolved into a
rare melee that led American soldiers to shoot at some Afghan soldiers who
insisted they were not involved in any insider killing. After 35 minutes of
gunfire and grenade explosions, two Americans and, ultimately, four Afghans
died; three Americans and two Afghans were wounded; and the coalition had
experienced one of the most corrosive insider attacks of the war.

“Something like this is
fairly traumatic, and we want to stop it from affecting future operations,”
said one senior official with the NATO-led International Security Assistance
Force, commonly referred to as ISAF. “But there’s also the recognition that
talk can’t fix everything.”

Afghan soldiers caught
up in the fighting say that the relationship between the two forces now seems
more starkly distant.

“We cannot be their
friends, because they do not speak our language,” said Redi Gul, 28, a soldier
whose back was burned raw as he tried to escape from his outpost after it was
set ablaze by American gunfire and grenades.

His observation seems as
much a metaphor for the chasm between the two as a simple statement of fact.

The fighting unfolded
near the outpost, known as Sisay, along a bad stretch of highway near the mouth
of the Tangi Valley in eastern Afghanistan’s rugged Wardak Province. The
Taliban are never far away here: roadside bombs pit the asphalt every mile or
so, and insurgent attacks occur almost daily against army and police convoys
and traveling fuel tankers. The bad feelings started here well before the
bullets began flying, according to the surviving Afghan soldiers from this
outpost and the nearby battalion headquarters. Both sides acknowledge that the
strains of an effort by American troops to minimize contact with their Afghan
counterparts during the recent epidemic of insider attacks became a factor on
the afternoon of Sept. 29.

The seven-man Afghan
force had been stationed here awhile, maintaining a security checkpoint on the
highway less than 100 yards from the outpost. But on the day of the attack, an
American unit drove up unannounced and began taking biometric readings of
drivers passing the checkpoint. The impression, the Afghans say, was that they
were not trusted enough to do the job or even receive a bit of notice that the
Americans would be working with them — an upsetting breach of field etiquette,
said Capt. Abdul Khaliq, the Afghan commander here.

“We were newly
introduced to this company about seven or eight months ago, but we haven’t sat
down together at all,” he said. American officials dispute this and say the two
units were acquainted.

One Afghan soldier named
Yusuf came down to the checkpoint with a cup of tea for the Americans’
interpreter and then returned to the outpost, according to the Afghan account.
Moments later, an Afghan soldier who had already been at the checkpoint, a
Tajik from Baghlan Province named Din Muhammad, raised his gun and fired,
killing Sgt. First Class Daniel T. Metcalfe, 29, and wounding another American
near him, according to the American account of the violence.

American soldiers
positioned nearby as guards for the force, known as “guardian angels,”
responded, shooting and killing Din Muhammad. They and American soldiers in
nearby vehicles then saw a man in an Afghan Army uniform behind the Afghan
outpost up the hill. The man began firing, they said, killing an American
civilian with the force and wounding two other soldiers.

The Americans soldiers
believed that they had wounded that gunman, but that fire was also coming from
the Afghan outpost itself, said an ISAF official who described parts of an
as-yet-unreleased report on the attack to a reporter for The New York Times.

With five team members
down, including their platoon sergeant, the Americans were taking no chances,
the ISAF official said.

“They thought, ‘Oh, this
is a setup, we’ve been ambushed,’ ” the official said. “You’re going to do
whatever you can to neutralize that threat — shooting from the turret, rifle
fire, grenades, you’re going to pour as much lead in as possible to save your
life.”

For Mr. Gul, who said
that he and his Afghan comrades were inside the outpost drinking tea, the first
evidence that something was wrong was when a hail of fire struck the base. They
were scrambling for their rifles when a grenade set the outpost on fire.

“The post caught fire,
we panicked, and we were looking for a way out. The flames blocked our way,” he
said. “We didn’t know who was shooting at us and from how many directions, and
because of the fire we couldn’t see and fire back.”

He said he managed to
claw his way out the back of the outpost, burned but able to function, and
crouched by a sand-filled barrier.

He saw Yusuf running
past him out of the outpost, but lost sight of him. It was only then that it
dawned on him that it was the Americans who were gunning them down. “We did not
fire a single shot,” Mr. Gul said. “We didn’t know who to shoot at. A second
grenade hit the outpost and blew up. There was some ammo that caught fire and
started exploding.”

The Americans saw Yusuf
running and shot him, unsure whether he was trying to escape or attack. Then
there was more confusion: both the Afghan and American soldiers say that fire
began coming from a mountain ridgeline behind the outpost.

The Afghan soldiers said
they were caught in a cross-fire, after Taliban fighters seemingly had decided
to join the fray. Later, Afghan soldiers said they found bullets from a PK
machine gun, a weapon used locally only by the Taliban, embedded in the
barriers around the outpost.

After some minutes, the
Americans were no longer completely sure whom they were shooting at either,
believing that fire was coming from the Afghan outpost and then from the
ridgeline. “It became very confused after the initial shooting,” the ISAF
official said. Still, the Americans sustained no further casualties after the
initial shots that day.

In addition to Din
Muhammad, Yusuf would later be counted among the dead, shot by the Americans as
he ran. Two more Afghans were killed at the outpost as well, one of their
bodies charred by the fire, said Mr. Gul and the company commander, Captain
Khaliq.

“Potentially innocent
people were killed, the smoke and dust,” made it hard for the Americans
soldiers to be sure of Yusuf’s intent as he ran, the ISAF official said. “Who
knew why he was running? Maybe someone took him as having hostile intent.
Either he was running for self-preservation or shooting at the Americans
defensively or participating in the attack.”

In the aftermath, the
Afghan officer, Captain Khaliq, is still looking for answers.

“I’ve been in the army
eight years, and why didn’t this kind of incident happen in the last eight
years?” he said. “The other American teams who came here were very good, they
visited with us every three or four days, they solved our problems.” He added that
if the American unit, a platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, had
coordinated with him ahead of time, perhaps he could have headed off any hard
feelings — perhaps even the shooting itself.

Speaking on the
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, ISAF officials
acknowledged the captain’s concerns and confirmed that the checkpoint mission
had not been coordinated ahead of time. From the American point of view, the
surprise visit was to keep locals from avoiding the checkpoint — and also a
tacit acknowledgment that after months of intensified insider attacks, also
called green-on-blue violence, things are different in the field.

“These green-on-blue
have really driven a wedge,” one official said.

At least in this stretch
of Wardak, the Afghan soldiers no longer seem able to imagine trust for their
American counterparts. Even if the Americans were to apologize for the
shooting, which is unlikely, the Afghans say they would never be able to
persuade the families of the dead to believe the condolences. “Well, tens of
such attacks have happened on innocent Afghans, and they came and apologized,
but what will a single apology do?” Captain Khaliq said of the Americans. “What
can we tell the families of those who were killed?”

For his part, Mr. Gul
felt profoundly betrayed.

“We used to normally go
out with Americans soldiers on patrols, operations and missions with no
problem. But we don’t know what went wrong this time, what thing made them go
crazy and fire at us,” he said. He acknowledged that the Americans later said
that Din Muhammad had fired first, though he and his comrades found even that
hard to believe. He added, “God is our witness that we have not even fired a
single shot, although we can shoot them — there are more of us than them.”

Sangar Rahimi and an employee of The New York
Times contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.